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End of the Innocents?

Today the Church celebrates the Feast of the Holy Innocents, the little boys who were massacred by Herod in an attempt to put the Christ Child to death. These “innocents” are now venerated as martyrs.

There is an obvious connection between the Holy Innocents and the victims of abortion, whose deaths are also made possible by political regimes that really want to kill God. After all, not only does Christ present Himself as an alternative to Caesar, but His Church is the definitive bastion of the natural law, objective truth, and moral goodness in the public square. In other words, the Church is the leading voice against the “tyranny of relativism” imposed by modern-day Herods.

But there is another set of innocents. I’m thinking of today’s youth, whose psychosexual development has largely been left in the same hands as those who wanted them killed in the womb. And so, in the name of “sex education,” today’s youth are robbed of their human dignity, their reproductive capacity, and ultimately the spark of the divine that makes them capable of receiving the gift of eternal life.

Against these odds, we have the Feast of the Holy Innocents to remind us that God’s mercy and goodness will triumph, though our witness requires courage and possibly martyrdom.

In view of all this, I thought I would excerpt an article on a Hong Kong bishop’s pastoral letter on sex education recently posted by ZENIT:

“In a pastoral letter for Christmas, Cardinal Joseph Zen responded to a push toward giving more information about contraception to young people and proposing ‘timely abortions’ as the solution to unexpected pregnancies.

“‘The holy Infant in the manger is crying,’ he wrote, ‘for too many young people are misled, too many families are shattered, too many little lives are abandoned.’”

To read the entire story of Cardinal Zen’s godly efforts to turn the tide in this battle, click here.